Calibrating a monitor

Hello all. I sell.some of my prints, and I also print a lot of my pictures. In the past I've looked at photos on my PC, and they looked correctly exposed and colored. When I receive prints, I have at times been let down with them being underexposed etc. How do I go about calibrating what I see on my laptop, to what will be printed on the medium of choice?
Thanks in advance.

Yep, you'll need a hardware calibration device, such as an X-Rite or Spyder.

Also installing an ICC printer profile provided by the lab for the media you're printing on will allow you to soft proof the file in Lightroom or Photoshop.

Also if the prints are coming back underexposed then you have your monitor or screen too bright.

Very common. Same thing for me. You have to realize that the monitor is a backlight source way different than paper. This took me awhile to figure out. In LR I bump the print brightness +10-20. I also purchased a calibration tool (Spyder4) Well worth it.

ThreeHounds wrote in post #17780367
Also installing an ICC printer profile provided by the lab for the media you're printing on will allow you to soft proof the file in Lightroom or Photoshop.

That will help.

Why Are My Prints Too Dark?

And try the PDI_Target_AdobeRGB.jp​g test files at the bottom of: http://www.gballard.ne​t/psd/srgbforwww.html so that you have a known baseline to work from.

Couple questions. Not sire where to start. So basically I need a tool to calibrate the monitor, I need to request an ICC profile from my printer so that is can softprof the files in lightroom (is there a tutorial on how to do this in lr?) And how do you bump up print brightness in lr? How do you know how much? What is my first step?

Do images look different on your laptop when you change your viewing angle? If you're fighting that, & don't think that a calibration tool will help much.

You can probably do as well by downloading the test file & trying to make it look good on your screen first.
Best solution would be to connect a CRT to the laptop & calibrate that. Or go back to your PC for critical editing.

Frodge wrote in post #17780604
And how do you bump up print brightness in lr? How do you know how much? What is my first step?

Before you do anything you need to turn down your monitor brightness a lot. For example, if your "out of the box" brightness is set to 50-60%, try 15%. It'll look really dim until you get used to it, but that's totally normal.

Once you do that the images will look too dark in LR ... just like your prints. Tweak from there until they look right.

First of all...heed what Frank suggested.
You can come close but, you will never get a print to exactly match your monitor.
Follow the mantra...when in doubt make a print, then make adjustments based on the outcome